No fluff or fantasy: Mister Pip

OK, OK, I broke my own rule... but it was a gift. Mister Pip by Lloyd Jones, was a Mother's Day gift.

The narrator, Matilida, uses Great Expectations as a catalyst to escape her war torn world. Through the course of the book, we come to realize that her beloved teacher, Mr. Watts does the same thing, but with him, one can't be sure what is fact or fiction.

Here is the publisher's description of the book:

After the trouble starts and the soldiers arrive on Matilda’s island, only one white person stays behind. Mr. Watts, whom the kids call Pop Eye, wears a red nose and pulls his wife around on a trolley, and he steps in to teach the children when there is no one else. His only lessons consist of reading from his battered copy of Great Expectations, a book by his friend Mr. Dickens.

For Matilda, Dickens’s hero Pip becomes as real to her as her own mother, and the greatest friendship of her life has begun. Soon Mr. Watts’s book begins to inflame the children’s imaginations with dreams about Dickens’s London and the larger world. But how will they answer when the soldiers demand to know: where is this man named Pip?

Set against the stunning beauty of Bougainville in the South Pacific during the civil war in the early 1990s, Lloyd Jones’s breathtaking novel shows what magic a child’s imagination makes possible even in the face of terrible violence and what power stories have to fuel the imagination.

I thoroughly enjoyed this work, but I have to read it again. It makes me think of Life of Pi to a certain degree, in the sense that the book illustrates how one can separate one's self during times of terrible trauma. Again, it was a highly engaging book with beautiful prose.

Four Queens: the Provencal sisters who ruled Europe

Here is publisher's blurb about the Four Queens, by Nancy Goldstone. Yes, this is non-fiction work set during the 13th century, but it was well written and fast paced. It shatters the myth that women were helpless pawns during this era and illustrates the qualities still found today in families, such as the love of parents, duty, sibling rivalry, independence and birth order.

Publisher's blurb:
Four Queens is a rich pageant of glamour, intrigue, and feminine power at a time when women were thought to have played limited roles. In thirteenth-century Europe, four sisters from a single family-Marguerite, Eleanor, Sanchia, and Beatrice of Provence-rose from obscurity to become the queens of, respectively, France, England, Germany, and Sicily. All four were beautiful, cultured, and ambitious, and their stories offer a window into the era of chivalry, crusades, poetry, knights, and monarchs that will appeal to fans of Alison Weir and Antonia Fraser."

The Mount

The Mount by Carol Emshwiller fulfils my mandate for fantasy and fluff for 2008, albeit, it is Science Fiction (don't want to get bogged down on details). Having ridden in the past, I loved the language Emshwiller used to describe the nuances of aliens riding foreign mounts. Her comments about how she got the idea for the book was also interesting. I would recommend this work to Science Fiction readers and I would read additional titles by Emshwiller. Thanks to The Jane Austen Book Club for directing me to this text!

From the Publisher
"A memorable alien-invasion scenario, a wild adventure, and a reflection on the dynamics of freedom and slavery."--"Booklist."
Winner of the 2002 Philip K. Dick Award.

Fluff and Fantasy: Jane Austen Book Club

My goal this year is to read nothing but fluff and fantasy. I started to read, Loving Frank, by
Nancy Horan, but I couldn't handle the separation of Momah, the married woman who falls in love with Frank Lloyd Wright, and her children. Not enough fluff for me.

So I turned to The Jane Austen Book Club, by Karen Joy Fowler. I enjoyed the book, but I didn't find the characters rich enough for me. I struggled to remember who was who and unlike books filled with different characters, I could barely visualize anyone. It was enjoyable though. And added bonus: I got a lead on a number of different science fiction authors. Science fiction is in line with my goal of fluff and fantasy. But back to JABC, here is a blurb from the publisher:

From the Publisher
In California''s central valley, five women and one man join to discuss Jane Austen's novels. Over the six months they get together, marriages are tested, affairs begin, unsuitable arrangements become suitable, and love happens. With her eye for the frailties of human behavior and her ear for the absurdities of social intercourse, Karen Joy Fowler has never been wittier nor her characters more appealing. The result is a delicious dissection of modern relationships.

Dedicated Austenites [which I'm not] will delight in unearthing the echoes of Austen that run through the novel, but most readers will simply enjoy the vision and voice that, despite two centuries of separation, unite two great writers of brilliant social comedy. "This exquisite novel is bigger and more ambitious than it appears Fowler''s shrewdest, funniest fiction yet, a novel about how we engage with a novel. You don''t have to be a student of Jane Austen to enjoy it, either. . . Lovers of Austen will relish this book, but I envy any reader who comes to it unfamiliar with her. There's no better introduction."

Eyre Affair by Jasper Fforde

I am having such a good time reading the Eyre Affair. It is refreshing and fun, and challenges me to use my English degree. I'm not even finished yet, but I would recommend it!

Here is a overview from Amazon.co.uk:
Pirouetting on the boundaries between sci-fi, the crime thriller and intertextual whimsy, Jasper Fforde's outrageous The Eyre Affair puts you on the wrong footing even on its dedication page, which proudly announces that the book conforms to Crimean War economy standard.

Fforde's heroine, Thursday Next, lives in a world where time and reality are endlessly mutable--someone has ensured that the Crimean War never ended for example--a world policed by men like her disgraced father, whose name has been edited out of existence. She herself polices text--against men like the Moriarty-like Acheron Styx, whose current scam is to hold the minor characters of Dickens' novels to ransom, entering the manuscript and abducting them for execution and extinction one by one. When that caper goes sour, Styx moves on to the nation's most beloved novel--an oddly truncated version of Jane Eyre--and kidnaps its heroine. The phlegmatic and resourceful Thursday pursues Acheron across the border into a Leninist Wales and further to Mr Rochester's Thornfield Hall, where both books find their climax on the roof amid flames.

Fforde is endlessly inventive: his heroine's utter unconcern about the strangeness of the world she inhabits keeps the reader perpetually double-taking as minor certainties of history, literature and cuisine go soggy in the corner of our eye. The audacity of the premise and its working out provides sudden leaps of understanding, many of them accompanied by wild fits of the giggles. This is a peculiarly promising first novel. --Roz Kaveney

OLA Superconference presentation

I did it.

I presented on Feb. 2 at the OLA Superconference in Toronto. I was more nervouse than anticipated, but once I got talking, it went well.

What did I present? BPL performed a Community Consultation (telephone survey) at the end of 2006. I didn't present the findings, but rather, discussed the process of getting the survey into the field as well as showing a few key findings. Discussion topics included what went well, and what we would do differently next time and how the findings influenced the Library.

In the end, I had a lot of fun. I really enjoyed this project. It was a wonderful learning opportunity. Just over a dozen people showed up, so it was a nice, intimate group. I was happy with the turn out considering that
- It was the last day of the conference and a lot of people left early due to the weather
- Competition was fierce. I was up against "Marian the Naughty Librarian: The Sexualization of Librarians in Popular Culture"; "Learning 2.0" with Stephen Abram and Jane Dysart, to name a few.

What's next? I volunteered to be a volunteer coorindator for 2009 which means I'll be the Lead in 2010.

As for another presentation? The Branding project would be of a lot of interest to people. I think our Web 2.0 training initiative would also be popular, especially when we add the public component.

How could anyone ever imagine that the Library field is staid?!

the Mom Song

To honour Amy and other amazing Mom's, here is the Mom song.